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Thunderbird POP timeout problem
Tags: I came across a problem today with Mozilla Thunderbird (though not necessarily isolated to this client) and the POP mail server. It came about because a user has been out of the office and not pop’ing his mail to the desktop. The server had accumulated 100MB of email over this time.
The problem
Thunderbird has a default pop timeout of 45 seconds. In that 45s, the client must authenticate, the server must create a lock file, and copy over the mail spool into a temporary file, before Thunderbird can begin downloading the mail. If the server cannot copy the 100MB mail file into a temporary file within the 45second limit the timeout message occurs.
The solution
The solution is logical, but inconveinent to implement. Microsoft Outlook has a nice ’server timeout’ setting in preferences, but Thunderbird’s is buried in a javascript file in the user’s profile (prefs.js). Editing that file and appending
user_pref(”mail.pop3_response_timeout”, 300);
to the end will increase the timeout to 300 seconds. After relaunching, Thunderbird can successfully download mail without the poplock busy error.
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Actually, if you are using Thunderbird 1.5 you can modify the setting of the configuration property through the GUI accessing Tools -> Options -> Advanced and modifying the value of “Connection timeout” (defaults to 60 seconds). This changes mailnews.tcptimeout (which is used instead of mail.pop3_response_timeout ). In previous releases you can install the AboutConfig extension to set the mail.pop3_response_timeout property in a more user-friendly way ( see https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=thunderbird&numpg=10&id=423)
Thank you so much for this. I did not realize that if the timeout was longer the mail server can actually download the data. I had tried what i thought was everything to get the mail to come in, now it has. Thanks a bunch